Ease of Development for Construct 3

I've created 4 ideas in total, and i'm already out of vote points for my own ideas. Unfortunately, i can't support any other ideas due to the lack of vote points. There are many great suggestions i would love to support.

The 2 most important to me being:

Multiplayer: Sync Interest Management

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-328

3D Camera Viewport

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-366

I also wrote several suggestions related to Ease of Development, and QOL stuff for C3 lately.

1. Family Inheritance (kinda)

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-347

Instead of implementing actual inheritance, it could just supports perfect syncing of Members between a Parent Family and its Child Family, as explained in the suggestion.

2. Hierarchy View

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-311

It would also allow to create hierarchy relationship directly by drag and dropping objects under/on top of each other in this dedicated view. On top of a lot of new QOL stuff it would allow, such as a way to efficently find and select instances of the current Layout

3. Variable Folders + directly add/edit Variables from Property View

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-348

How to enhance the Instance Variable workflow which is really tedious when number of variables is growing or when we want to edit Family variables of a selected Object Kind.

4. Hierarchy : Child Anchored to Parent (1 feature to enable full user-friendly UI system)

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-314

This possibility to Anchor Position/Size of Child Objects to their Parent (with defined offsets) would basically allow to create complex auto-layout UI, supporting all aspect ratio and so on, especially in combination with Events, it would basically allow us to do almost any kind of UI we can think of. It would also be useful for non-UI-related stuff.

5. Big list of Quality Of Life stuff

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-318

As Ashley pointed out, this last big list suggestion is not ideal as it doesn't really help Scirra to prioritize things, but here I come back from time to time to add the most important things that i think could improve ease of development. The 4 suggestions above are what I think is the biggest priority among this list.

There's too few votes to dole out

i can't support any other ideas due to the lack of vote points.

I think they want you to vote for your highest priority ideas only, which is actually the reason this topic has been created, to encourage priority voting for ease of development ideas, because no matter how many new features, unless the workflow is fast, any feature can become tedious to work with.

The 2 most important to me: Multiplayer: Sync Interest Management

The idea is very important, but it might be more of feature request for better working of multiplayer games and not an idea that eases the development of a game.

Added "3D Camera Viewport", "Hierarchy View" and "Variable Folders" to the list. Thank you for the suggestions.

1. Family Inheritance (kinda), 4. Hierarchy : Child Anchored to Parent

I think the ideas are declined by ashley in the comment section due to huge amount of work required.

I think it would be better to suggest ideas that are simple enough to add by scirra and yet improve the quality of development a lot (that's also what their guidelines say), It also says that ideas that are possible with workarounds would not be considered, but again, that's the whole point of this post, the ease of development might be getting neglected and in many cases the workarounds are too much work.

5. Big list of Quality Of Life stuff

The idea is already present in this post, but as you know, they need to be added separately to be considered by scirra, i might have covered some of them and some of them may already be present on the platform.

The Family Inheritance wasn't tagged as "Declined" on the platform, also as explained in 2 differents places, the suggestion was updated after the Ashley comment to match his guidelines. So his remark about the feasibility doesn't apply to this new suggestion to achieve Family Inheritance using a trick that would synchronize members of Child and Parent Family. (his comment was regarding previous "Dynamic Families" suggestion that would be a brand new family type that supports both Multi-Plugin members and Family Inheritance)

Same for the Hierarchy Anchors, the idea wasn't tagged as "Declined". He just thought about an other way to achieve this (using a new behavior instead) and then I explained why I think the alternative feature he suggested doesn't work well, also why I think Hierarchy Anchors logic could be in fact seperated from most of the usual Hierarchy position logic.

The fact Ashley commented a suggestion or wondered if something simplier couldn't be done doesn't mean it will never happen or nothing can be done regarding that area. Otherwise he would just tag it "Will not implement". It can just be the start of a discussion about that lacking feature, so Scirra better understands why we definitely need something, how this feature could be enhanced/simplified to be more feasible.

It happened several times before that Scirra told something would never happen but it finally was released.

Got it! Added "Family Inheritance" and "Hierarchy | Child Anchored to Parent" to the list.

The idea is very important, but it might be more of feature request for better working of multiplayer games and not an idea that eases the development of a game.

It would truly ease game development a hundred fold when using multiplayer. Because it's easier than coding your own Multiplayer Plugin from scratch, or recreating the sync function with the send message event as a less performant function. ;)

Just like any other idea only helps for its own specific task.

It was top 3 of the highest voted ideas in the archive, and for good reasons.

Added Multiplayer: Sync Interest Management

I guess it does not matter, because the ideas have not gained the traction needed, don't know if its due to the limited votes or because there are so many ideas to choose from that the votes are getting divided into them. Should we discuss and then vote, i don't know, let me know if you have any ideas for , may be in time some of these will gain popularity.

Aha platform has an API that can probably be used to present the ideas here on the site in a special page.

That would be a great way to engaging more people on the forum and make better discussions before voting.

Just realised that we don't even have a decent "button" to use in a game, the existing button object has boxy look that cannot be changed and no other required properties like interactive or working when invisible etc. So you have to create a sprite, then add touch object, then code for tap or touching, then add condition for whether it is on the right layer to be interactive and is visible or not, only to realise that the button is not working because there is another button on some layer exactly below it.

It is astonishing to see how people want new features instead of having effective tools like a simple button that could help building decent games without wasting time or money.

I guess this is why even after seven years of working with construct, i am still unable to earn anything with my games, simply because i am unable to keep them flawless, no matter how much time i put into it. I have earned a decent income by helping other construct developers for a year, but non of those developers have made any from their final games, because games are not flawless, it takes so much time correcting issues that you cannot be fully creative it, and when you get creative, you end up with a buggy game. You need both time and money to put it right. And sometimes it feels as if scirra is developing construct as a hobby too. I don't blame them, its their company, their choice. And i still stick with construct too, because i still like it, and because i don't like coding.

I've suggested this for years, so I'd appreciate any feedback since I'm not sure why it's ignored: the current event sheet Search feature is severely limited and sometimes useless! It could be easily improved if it wasn't searching for an "exact string match" but "contains all words".

If the search was improved it would make it far more efficient to navigate large event sheets.

A simple scenario where the current search has failed: I want to find where I set "sprite" to invisible, so I put the words contained in that event into the field, but because the event wasn't an exact match, despite containing all the words in that event, it was unable to find anything:

It says there are 0 results, when this is untrue, there is an event that perfectly represents what I'm searching for.

construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-253

That's true, searching is very limited, and sometimes you scroll between hundreds of results to find somthing. it should be based on keywords.

It is one of those fundamental ideas that greatly effect the development ease for everyone...

Added "Search for words in the event editor"

Thank you for the suggestion.

Edit : Organised the Ideas for better understanding.

One of the ideas got added in r299 https://www.construct.net/en/make-games/releases/beta/r299

"Is Effect Enabled" condition ...https://construct3-21h2.ideas.aha.io/ideas/C321H2-I-349

Cheers!